Trump and Putin's Unholy Alliance

The guy who claims he cares about "America First" heads to Alaska this week where he'll likely bow to the interests of the Russian president

Trump and Putin in 2018 after their private meeting in Helsinki—and minutes before Trump betrayed America. (Photo by Chris McGrath via Getty Images)

I will never get over July 16, 2018, when a beaten-looking Donald Trump emerged from a private meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki and betrayed America. He did so by siding with the Russian dictator over the findings of our nation’s 17 intelligence agencies concerning Russian interference in the 2016 election. "President Putin says it's not Russia,” Trump said. “I don't see any reason why it would be.”

Unsurprisingly, the White House occupant who’s currently engaged in a cover-up of his involvement with child rapist and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, made sure that no interpreter’s notes from that Helsinki meeting would ever see the light of day. In fact, while it was widely reported that Trump confiscated his interpreter’s notes after a meeting with Putin in Hamburg, Germany in 2017, that was just one of five one-on-one encounters with Putin from which there’s no detailed record even in classified files.

As the Washington Post reported in 2019, this was “part of a broader pattern by the president of shielding his communications with Putin from public scrutiny and preventing even high-ranking officials in his own administration from fully knowing what he has told one of the United States’ main adversaries.” (Asked about this by a reporter, Trump said dismissively that his talks with Putin are “none of your business.”)

I would add that this tracks with Trump’s consistent pattern of never publicly criticizing Putin, adding weight to the still-alarming assertion that he is a long-time asset of Russia, dating back to his first visit to Moscow in 1987 and years and years of laundering dirty Russian money through his real estate operations. There is, of course, much more to say about Trump’s Russian involvements, which he has sought with mind-numbing repetition to cover up as the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax”—not least of which is how his unholy alliance with Putin belies his phony claim that he’s committed to “America First.”

This Friday Trump is meeting Putin in Alaska. He’s billing it as a peace talk concerning the end of the Russia-Ukraine war. But let’s not be lulled into believing that this is not just another self-serving venture for Trump.

What kind of peace talks are they when the meeting only involves Trump and Putin, who is responsible for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the deaths of as many as 100,000 Ukrainians?

They can fallaciously portray the meeting as a meeting to seek peace but it won’t include Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who would be the only one there sticking up for Ukraine and democracy. Nor, by the way, do Trump and Putin show the slightest interest in involving NATO or the European Union.

And what kind of peace talks are they when Trump henchman and the regime’s NATO ambassador, Matthew Whittaker, goes on national TV Sunday and declares, “No big chunks or sections are going to be just given that haven't been fought for or earned on the battlefield."

Really? ‪Illegally invade a country, commit war crimes on a mass scale, and then Trump’s operative talks about the invader “earning” a sovereign nation’s land?

Let’s not forget that candidate Trump boasted he’d end the war in 24 hours. Nearly seven months into this arsonist’s destruction of America—the kind of destruction that even Putin couldn’t have dreamed possible—Trump has proven himself unable to motivate the Kremlin’s murderous thug to stop the killing and go home.

Trump already declared on Friday that there would need to "be some swapping of territories" for Russia and Ukraine to reach a settlement. Talk about the “art of the deal.” But Zelensky wasn’t having it.

"We will not reward Russia for what it has perpetrated," he replied. "Any decisions against us, any decisions without Ukraine, are also decisions against peace." Moreover, Zelensky insisted any conclusions reached without Kyiv’s input would amount to “dead decisions.” He also said a deal that involved Russia taking control of seized regions is “against our Constitution.”

So we are left to wonder what Trump is really after in hosting Putin on American soil, which in an alternate world would be an opportunity to act on the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for his deadly actions in Ukraine.

Yes, last month Trump uncharacteristically told the BBC that he was "disappointed by Putin.” He then set an August 8 deadline for the Russian president to agree to an immediate ceasefire or face more severe US sanctions.

In a clear sign of how seriously Putin takes Trump’s demands, Russia has expanded its drone and missile attacks in Ukraine, resulting in record civilian casualties. Trump can claim that his special envoy Steve Witkoff had “highly productive” discussions with Putin in Moscow this week, but don’t count on this meeting leading to an agreement that genuinely paves the way toward peace.

Given Trump’s ridiculous obsession with winning a Nobel Peace Prize, he may have an actual desire to see an end to the bloodshed. But we have no reason to assume that he would risk crossing Putin to get there.

It’s always sensible to consider the worst motivations for Trump’s actions. So let’s not doubt the possibility that he’s looking at his unholy alliance with Putin as an opportunity to get his support if Trump emulates him by invading a sovereign territory such as Greenland or Panama and then demanding peace only after seizing control of the desired region.

I hope I’m wrong. But we are unlikely to know what exactly Trump does arrange with Putin, since his backroom dirty dealings are always “none of your business.”

That’s what he thought in 2019, and it’s surely what he thinks now as his so-called presidency is primarily focused on self-dealing, retribution and cover-ups.

I would still like to know what kompromat—compromising information useful for blackmail—Putin is successfully holding over Trump. If Trump emerges Friday looking anything like he did after his private session with Putin in Helsinki, you can be sure that Mr. America First is still focused on serving Russia first.

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